It's like the secret beaches in every south-east asian nook and crany. They're so secret there's signs pointing to them every where and they are overrun with tourists.

Tony Wheeler has a lot to answer for

Ah, the classic “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” :)

HN titles generally shouldn’t be clickbait.. what would you suggest instead?

In this case I would have gone with something like:

Management Science & Engineering (MS&E): Stanford’s interdisciplinary hub

You could have gone with something a bit catchier, "The Stanford Program that few people know about" which would have the same sentiment and would definitely get more clicks than your suggestion.

I guess that depends on what you think the purpose of these titles is: to get people to click, or to tell them what the article is actually about so they can make an informed decision whether or not to click. If your goal is the former then just go with "The secret to everything! Best article ever written! Must read!" no matter what the actual content is.

Do you want people to read the thing or not. Giving the exact course name as the title guarantees very few people will read it. Telling the potential reader there's a class few people know about has a better chance. I think we can all agree that the point of any written text is for someone to read it at some point. How many books have titles that are descriptive of the contents and not something just to get you to at least pick it up and read the jacket? How many titles of movies or music albums as well? Just so as we are all clear that your attempt to be pedantic on a title definition was very much ignoring anything but something like a news headline

ha, no one would have clicked on that title. Needs some cta and pep in it.

But Claude gives me:

"Stanford's 230-Student Program That Produces More Unicorn Founders Than Most Schools"

"Why Stanford Engineers Are Choosing MS&E Over CS: A Technical MBA That Actually Works"

"Stanford's MS&E: The 7.8% Acceptance Rate Program Behind Instagram, Gusto, and Sourcegraph

"How Stanford's MS&E Became Y Combinator's Secret Feeder Program"

"

This is an extremely amusing turn of phrase

Oh man, if you liked that, then you should read up on more Yogisms:

https://yogiberramuseum.org/about-yogi/yogisms/

> no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded

This seems like a paradox but actually isn't.

The trick is to correctly interpret what is actually being said. No one goes there anymore - this is clearly meant in a casual imprecise way not literally 0. So how can we precisely state what is meant?

I would interpret it as the proportion of some group of people going there is now very low.

On the other hand that it is crowded is a different thing. It says that the absolute number of people going there is too high. Furthermore, those people may be different from the group in the first part.

Two example scenarios:

* None of my friends go there anymore, the number of tourists is too high.

* As the city has grown, the place has reached capacity meaning that a smaller proportion of the city can visit.

Pretty sure any Stanford student would have heard about it. For students graduating in 2023-2024 year, Management Science and Engineering was the 9th most popular bachelor's degree and 7th most popular master's degree.

https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/degrees-conferred

We've de-baited the title now.